What strategy is to military operations, policy is to civil affairs and
military government. Policy lends form and purpose to the government of occupied
and liberated territory and is ultimately as much concerned with winning wars as
the military strategy itself. Washington and London both were aware of this
fact, and neither questioned the extension of the partnership developed in the
war to the formulation of civil affairs and military government policy. The
partnership was not one without differences, however, and the partners were not
without independent ambitions; civil affairs and military government gave ample
scope to both.

The first organization, either British or American, to be concerned
specifically with defining civil affairs policy was the Administration of
Territories (Europe) Committee. The AT (E) Committee traced its origins back to
the early planning for ROUNDUP in the spring of 1942. As a committee of the
British War Office, it held its first meeting on 2 July 1942 under the
chairmanship of the Permanent Under Secretary for War, Sir Frederick E.
Bovenschen. By then ROUNDUP, after a brief period of combined planning, was
reverting to the British while the Americans took up the planning for the North
Africa operation. Although the AT (E) Committee was entirely British, under its
terms of reference it assumed broad authority to devise policy that would
"ensure efficient civil administration of the territories liberated in Europe as the result of operations by
forces of the United Nations" and to maintain contact for this purpose with the
Allied exile governments and with ETOUSA.

ROUNDUP, never much in favor with the British Chiefs of Staff, quickly fell
into abeyance, but the AT (E) Committee met regularly after July 1942,
concerning itself chiefly with relief and with the negotiation of civil affairs
agreements with the exile governments. The occupation of Germany as yet seemed
too remote to be pertinent. At its first meeting the committee agreed to arrange
for an ETOUSA representative to sit in on future meetings; therefore, from the
third meeting on, at least one liaison officer from ETOUSA attended first Colonel
Betts, later Colonel Wade, and for a time both. Their instructions were to
attend the meetings "without accepting the responsibility of making final
decisions which have not already received the approval of this headquarters."
1The Americans' status was uncertain from the
beginning. The British apparently wanted to regard the men as full-fledged
members. ETOUSA seems at first to have intended to negotiate with the committee
through them but, as the American concern with ROUNDUP declined in the summer of
1942, came to regard them merely as observers.2

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The revival of the cross-Channel attack in early 1943 raised, more urgently
than the 1942 approach to ROUNDUP had, the question of combined civil affairs
planning for northwestern Europe. In April, the representatives of the British
Chiefs of Staff on the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS ) proposed that civil affairs
policy-planning during the period of military control be delegated to the AT
(E) Committee and that special War Department representatives be assigned to
sit on the committee. For the subsequent period of civilian control they proposed
the creation of a committee in Washington under State Department leadership
composed of interested British and U.S. civilian agencies including War Department
and CCS representatives.3The US Joint Chiefs objected that the British proposals would create
a dual chain of command and jeopardize the hard-fought principle of military
necessity. They proposed, instead, the creation of a combined civil affairs
committee to function under the Combined Chiefs of Staff with authority both
to formulate directives to commanders in the field and to co-ordinate the activities
of US and British civilian agencies.4

Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) did not comment specifically on the
AT (E) Committee, the Americans clearly indicated that they did not regard it
as a suitable vehicle for combined civil affairs planning. On 13 April, at a
meeting in the US Embassy in London, the Commanding General, ETOUSA, at the
time General Andrews, expressed the American view that COSSAC would handle all
plans for cross-Channel operations and, thus, would supersede the AT (E) Committee.
Two weeks later, Colonel Wade reported that the committee had completed the
estimates for the military phase in cross-Channel operations and was moving
on to long-range planning which did not concern ETOUSA; he recommended, therefore,
that active ETOUSA participation on the committee be withdrawn.5

The Americans had, in fact, come to regard civil affairs as a
unilateral concern and the AT (E) Committee as a British committee with which
they might exchange opinion but could not negotiate, since neither ETOUSA nor
the War Department itself had anybody authorized to do so at the time.
Consequently, while in the British view the AT (E) Committee performed a
valuable and needed service for the alliance, the Americans saw in it an attempt
to pre-empt the civil affairs planning in the British interest, particularly
after the committee and its most active offshoot, the Shipping and Supply
Subcommittee, began to concentrate on relief and seemed about to assign the
furnishing of relief supplies to the United States and their distribution to
British agencies. The overt American objections to the AT (E ) Committee were
that it renewed the danger of civilian interference in the military phase end
that civil affairs ought to be in exactly the same command channel as the
tactical troops, namely, under the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
6

Toward the end of May, the British War Office agreed with two provisos, to
accept a combined civil affairs committee in Washington under the CCS. In the
first

[35]

proviso the War Office required exemption from combined control for recovered
territories which had originally been possessions of the United Kingdom, the
Dominions, or the United States. In the second it insisted on expanding the
AT (E) Committee into a fully combined committee "with strong US representation
which must be fully authorized to speak for the US Government."
7Within less than a week, the Civil Affairs Division of the
US War Department had recast the JCS proposal to incorporate the British provisos,
but the agreement in principle thus easily reached was to meet far rougher going
when it came to writing a charter for a combined civil affairs committee. In
a foretaste of similar arguments to come, the British and Americans fell to
debating hypothetical aspects of the first British proviso, meanwhile ignoring
the immediate and practical implications of the second.

On 3 July, after nearly a month's intensive discussion, the Combined Chiefs
of Staff approved a tentative charter for the Combined Civil Affairs Committee
(CCAC). Paragraph 6, concerned with CCAC authority in areas in which one or
the other of the partners claimed sovereignty, was still undergoing revision;
but since the CCAC would not have to deal with any such problems for awhile,
it could function adequately without the paragraph.8On 7 July, General Marshall authorized General Devers to appoint
an officer from the ETOUSA staff to serve as US member of the AT (E) Committee.9In Washington, the CCAC held its first formal meeting on the 15th
under the chairmanship of Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, but by
then the CCAC was already quickly lapsing into a state of paralysis.

Some weeks before, the AT (E) Committee had sent to Washington a draft civil
affairs agreement with Norway. According to their understanding of the CCAC
charter, the British expected the US Joint Chiefs to review the document and
return it to London, where the combined negotiations would be completed by the
US representation on the AT (E) Committee. The Americans insisted on prior submission
to the CCAC, which they maintained constituted the final authority in civil
affairs decisions.10Until then neither side had fully enlightened the other as to its
interpretation of the charter. The British now revealed that they considered
the AT (E) Committee to be the principal combined planning agency for all civil
affairs operations based in the United Kingdom, hence for all of northwestern
Europe.11The Americans, on the other hand, had never intended to recognize
the AT (E) Committee as a combined agency. In recommending approval of US membership
on the committee General Hilldring had stated, "it does not appear to be
desirable to have the War Department recognize and be a part of any agreements
which are made by the War Office Committee [AT (E) ] ."
12

Subsequently, through the summer, the

[36]

combined planning degenerated into a tug of war over the Norwegian agreement,
with the Americans insisting that one way or another, no matter how fleetingly,
the paper had to pass through the CCAC and with the British staunchly refusing
to have the CCAC lay so much as a finger on it. By mid-September the frustration
reached such intensity that General Hilldring contemplated a direct assault
on the AT (E ) Committee. To General Barker, chief of the US element in COSSAC,
he expressed the opinion that the AT (E) Committee no longer had "any real
function to perform" (because primary responsibility for combined planning
was vested in the CCS and CCAC) and, therefore, if Barker considered it politically
expedient, the US representative on the committee ought to be withdrawn.13The suggestion was not acted upon, though it almost certainly would
eventually have been had the committee not resolved on its own accord in October
to suspend its meetings while the War Office and Foreign Office reassessed its
relationship to the CCAC.14

In Moscow the Tripartite Conference of Foreign Ministers, under a secret
protocol signed on 1 November 1943, created the European Advisory Commission (EAC) and charged it with tripartite planning on questions pertaining to the
occupation. At the conference, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, British
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Anthony Eden, and Soviet People's
Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov had been mostly concerned with the agenda for the
forthcoming Big Three conference at Tehran. Hull and Eden, however, had also
hoped to begin establishing, for the last stage of the war against Germany,
something like the collaboration that had existed between the Western Allies
since 1941 but had so far not been attained with the Soviet Union. Since
OVERLORD would meet the long-standing Soviet demand for a full scale second
front, the development of common approaches and objectives not only for the war
but also for the period after the victory seemed both possible and necessary.
The British and American thinking on the RANKIN plan, since it presupposed a
German surrender before Western forces were on the Continent, even lent a degree
of urgency to tripartite agreement on occupation policy.

The Americans and British were pleased, and a trifle surprised, to find the
Russians willing to discuss postwar questions, but the Americans were much less
pleasantly surprised when Eden proposed that the European Advisory Commission
have its seat in London and be the vehicle for tripartite decisions. The
Americans saw in this proposal an attempt to replace the faltering AT (E)
Committee with a more powerful body and capture for London the entire field of
postwar planning. The Russians, for their part, were quite willing to
participate in broad decision-making for areas of primary concern to the Western
Allies but gave no indication that they would reciprocate where areas of direct
interest to them were concerned. As finally drafted, the terms of reference of
the EAC were left sufficiently indefinite to accommodate both the British
expectations and the American and Soviet reservations. "The Commission," the
Moscow protocol stated, "will

[37]

study and make joint recommendations to the three Governments upon European
questions connected with the termination of hostilities which the three
Governments may consider appropriate to refer to it."
15

The European Advisory Commission was to meet in London. Eden, on his return
from Moscow, named as United Kingdom delegate Assistant Under Secretary of State
in the Foreign Office Sir William Strang, who was already thoroughly familiar
with the British thinking on postwar plans. As the seat for the commission, the
British government renovated and redecorated the palatial Lancaster House to
make it "a building where medium-sized international conferences could be held
in conditions worthy of a great capital."
16Strang's was a full-time appointment
and the British were somewhat chagrined when the United States and the Soviet
Union appointed as their delegates their ambassadors in London, John G. Winant
and Fedor T. Gousev, who would both continue to perform their ambassadorial
duties.17

In the War Department, the creation of the EAC aroused severe misgivings,
particularly after reports from London described the preparations to house it as
being made on a scale extensive enough to accommodate "a major interallied
organization."
18Moreover, no matter what the eventual scope of the EAC, it would
inevitably lend a political aspect to civil affairs and military government. The
Supreme Commander, when he was appointed, would from the beginning not be guided solely
by military considerations and international law but would be saddled
with and constantly have to adjust his plans to any developments in national or
international policy conveyed to him either by the governments or through the
EAC. The War Department, in turn, would have to accept increased State
Department influence in civil affairs and military government planning.19

In November, the tug of war between Washington and London brought civil affairs
planning outside of COSSAC to a standstill. After General Barker reported that
the AT (E) Committee "unhappily," he said, was not as defunct as the
Americans had thought, ETOUSA acted to hasten the committee's demise by withdrawing
the US representative.20The British, on the other hand, now wanted the CCAC transferred
to London and, to emphasize their desire, ordered their representatives on the
committee to refuse to talk about anything having to do with Europe. For several
weeks the CCAC ceased meeting altogether. Caught between the withdrawal of US
recognition and its own government's pursuit of more important prizes, the AT
(E) Committee finally became a casualty of the struggle. It held its last meeting
on 2 December.

After Hull returned from Moscow, Stimson undertook to impress on the
President before his departure for Tehran the War Department's antipathy toward
a strong EAC.21 Later in the month, Assistant Secretary of War McCloy went along
as a

[38]

member of the United States delegation to preliminary talks with the British
in Cairo to argue the case for the Washington CCAC. On the British side, the
Prime Minister had been briefed to urge the CCAC's transfer to London.22

The President and the Prime Minister did not take up the matters either of
the EAC or the CCAC, but McCloy found Eden eager to talk about both and, in the
end, came away believing he had gotten what he needed. When McCloy complained
about the British CC AC representatives' tongues being tied, Eden replied that
if the United States agreed to treat the EAC seriously he would see to it that
the tongues were loosened. In return for support of the EAC, Eden proposed to
have the commission's recommendations submitted to the CC AC for comment, give
up the attempt to have the CC AC shifted to London, and allow the British
representatives in the CCAC to participate fully in decisions related to
operations based in the United Kingdom.23

In subsequent talks both with Eden and with the War Office Director of Civil
Affairs, Maj. Gen. S. W. Kirby, McCloy explained the War Department's desire
to keep the civil affairs control in Washington as a necessity of US domestic
policy. He asked Eden to avoid playing up the EAC as the "great decider"
of all postwar questions, and he told General Kirby that isolationism and anti-British
feelings were far from dead in the United States and would increase if the decisions
were being made in London. He indicated to both that the War Department was
not as much interested in where the decisions were actually made as it was in
preserving the appearance of having them emanate from Washington. Hence, the
CCAC would have to stay in Washington, even if most of the decisions were made
in London and only funneled through Washington.24

The spirit of Cairo, such as it was, did not outlast the meeting. On 14 December,
the War Department, apparently not aware that the AT(E) Committee was defunct,
directed ETOUSA to make certain that any US personnel who might attend meetings
of the committee did not take an active part in the discussions; a week later
the US civil affairs officers in COSSAC received orders not to attend AT (E)
Committee meetings at all.25 On 5 January 1944, anticipating the first formal session
of the EAC early in the new year, Adm. William D. Leahy sent the JCS guidelines
for the US delegation of the EAC to Secretary Hull. "The EAC," Leahy
wrote, "from the US point of view is an important body, whose functioning
and development should be guided and maintained in accordance with the US concept
as to the scope of its activities and the manner of its operation." The
scope, from the JCS point of view, was to he narrow, with a tight rein kept
on the manner of operation. "The EAC," Leahy continued, "should
keep strictly within the letter and spirit of its directive and in so doing
in particular avoid problems relating to the conduct of military operations
and concerning civil affairs of liberated or enemy territory prior to the end
of hostilities." The JCS strictures further required that Ambassador Winant

[39]

submit "all studies and proposed recommendations of the EAC" for
approval by appropriate US agencies before making commitments on them and that
all questions involving military matters "either directly or indirectly"
be passed on by the JCS, the theater commander, or the War or Navy Departments
as appropriate.26The State Department had, in fact, in its instructions to Winant
already excluded the period of hostilities from the EAC's area of discussion,
and the President had earlier, according to Hull, warned against allowing the
EAC to arrogate to itself the general field of postwar organization. Consequently,
in the US concept as transmitted to Winant, the EAC could have at the outset
only two functions: to draft the surrender documents for Germany and her allies
and to devise the Allied control machinery to be imposed after the surrender.
27

On his return to London, General Kirby found understanding for the American
attitude as expressed by Assistant Secretary McCloy but no inclination to
abandon the struggle for control of civil affairs. The most the War Office would
concede was the formation of a second CCAC in London possessing the authority
formerly claimed for the AT (E) Committee, namely, control of civil affairs and
military government in operations based in the United Kingdom. In January, Sir
Frederick Bovenschen went to Washington to try to secure agreement on these
terms.28 Sir Frederick's mission was, as the British official historian stated, "on paper,
entirely successful."
29On 29 January, the CCS approved a new CCAC charter.
Under it the Washington committee was to recommend general civil affairs
policies to the Combined Chiefs of Staff and be responsible for broad civil
affairs planning. A London committee-CCAC (L) was created which was to give
guidance and make recommendations to the European and Mediterranean theater
commanders ("within the framework of CCS directives"), resolve questions raised
by the theater commanders ("not requiring submission to the CCS"), and make
recommendations to the CCS.30The new charter, like
the old, skirted the main question:
Where did the ultimate authority really lie?

The first EAC meeting, on 14 January, and the approval of the CCAC (L)
charter two weeks later completed the formative period of the Allied and combined
planning agencies for the occupation of Germany. In neither instance was there
or would there ever be a full consensus on the role of the two bodies. In the
EAC, the Soviet interpretation of the commission's terms of reference soon proved
to be more restrictive even than that of the United States. The CCAC (L) , excluded
from broad planning by the Washington committee and from decisions in the theater
by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), held only seven
formal meetings, and these with its American members under orders to see that
the committee accomplished as little as possible.31
The Washington CCAC emerged as the

[40]

principal combined civil affairs and military government planning agency; but
the authority to decide major issues, the subject of the struggle between
Washington and London, for the most part remained outside its grasp. The
Norwegian agreement never was submitted to the CCAC nor were the civil affairs
agreements with other occupied countries. After the British failed to have the
agreements adopted in the EAC, the United States, the United Kingdom, and (for Norway) the Soviet Union
negotiated identically worded but separate agreements with the countries
concerned.
32 For the military government of Germany the CCAC would provide the
appearance but little substance of combined policy.